Tears in the Darkness

The Normans' magisterial history of one of the darkest chapters of modern warfare is one of those rare books that transforms readers. Those who read this book will be affected in different ways; some by the inconceivable suffering and cruelty, and some by the courage and grace of those who suffered. The authors have included not only the entire history of the death march and imprisonment, but also the consequences of these things on individuals, especially Montana's courageous Army Air Force enlistee Ben Steele, one of the few who survived. There was one episode that was particularly telling. After the war Steele became an art professor, and the day came when a Japanese-American student entered his class, and all the horror and bitterness and desolation of his three years of imprisonment rushed back into Steele's mind. But then he learned that the student's Japanese-American family had been interned here in the States. Steele invited the student into his office for a heart-to-heart talk, and out of it came reconciliation. Ben Steele treated his Japanese student with all the fairness he could muster. Other readers will discover other treasures in this powerful and luminous history. But no reader will finish the book unchanged.

I'm not usually inclined to read books about war, but I picked this up and couldn't put it down. It follows the story of a boy from Montana who ends up a soldier in the Bataan Death March. Even though the reader knows in the first few pages that the soldier, Ben Steele, survives, and is still alive in fact, I found myself on the edge of my seat and praying for him to make it. His story is heartbreaking, uplifting and compelling all at once. The book is not for the faint of heart and is harrowing in many places, but it's written with a kind of simplicity and grace that shows above all, the ambiguity of war. Tremendous.

In their book, "Tears in the Darkness," Michael and Elizabeth Norman, have taken a historical event, the American defeat and its horrific aftermath in the Philippines at the start of Word War II in 1942 and turned it into a spell-binding exploration of the human spirit. At the center of the tale, of course, is the Bataan Death March. But after ten years of incredibly detailed research on both sides of the Pacific, the authors are able to render its full reality from a variety of individual perspectives: American, Japanese and Filipino. The result is a revelation -- not merely a narrative of courage, sacrifice, cruelty and suffering, but also, ultimately, of the redemptive power of reflection and forgiveness. It may also be the most moving book ever written about those dark April days almost seven decades ago and men who experienced them.